4 November 2005
Quake relief makes Ramadan 'most meaningful' for Muslim aid worker
By Anto Akkara
NEW DELHI (CNS) -- A Muslim who works for Catholic Relief Services said responding to the Pakistani earthquake emergency made the previous month "the most meaningful Ramadan fast in my life."
"This (Ramadan) is a holy month, and it was a blessing to get an opportunity to do so much good action in this period," said Gul Wali Khan, a Muslim and emergency coordinator for CRS, the U.S. bishops' international relief and development agency. Khan, who has worked for CRS for a decade, spoke in a telephone interview from his home in Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province, Nov. 3.
Khan left his home within hours of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake Oct. 8 and returned Nov. 3 to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the most important Islamic festival.
"Jokingly, we used to say, 'We have two fasts these days,'" said Khan, who coordinates the work of the 150 staff and energetic young volunteers -- most of them Muslims -- drawn from Catholic Relief Services' six local partners.
Apart from the regular Ramadan fast from dawn to dusk, even without water, Khan said the "second fast" consisted of hiking through the mountains carrying relief material to remote villages.
"By the time we reached the villages, we would be very tired. But when we saw the joy in the faces of these people, we felt so happy and satisfied. Then, we felt all the trouble we had taken was worth it," said Khan.
When the CRS volunteers took tents to homeless people in the mountains, he said, the villagers would "rush forward and embrace us with tears of joy. That was an unforgettable experience."
At the end of the day, the relief workers would often break the fast in their vans because they would be far from the base camps at Mansehra or Besham Qala.
"But none complained about this routine. Everyone was happy and satisfied that we could do some real good work during (Ramadan) fast," Khan said.
The earthquake was centered in Kashmir, a disputed territory shared by India and Pakistan, and more than 73,000 people died in Pakistan. Khan said CRS relief teams, like others, had been leaving the base camps at sunrise to head to the remote villages on empty stomachs due to the Ramadan fast.
After traversing the rugged rocky roads, the volunteers hiked two to three hours daily to reach remote villages and assess their needs before giving them relief coupons to collect the relief material the next day.
By the next morning, volunteers at the CRS base camps would have loaded small trucks with the tents, woolen quilts and kitchen utensils. The trucks traveled as far as they could on the roads, then villagers would come collect supplies or, if the distance was too far, CRS volunteers would carry the materials close to the village.
Although CRS workers explored the possibility of using donkeys and mules to carry the relief materials to the mountain villages, Khan said the animals could not carry the material up the rocky terrain.
"But time is running out for us," he said. "Winter is coming fast, and there will be two to five feet of snow in these areas" by mid-November, Khan said.
"If they do not receive enough shelter material before that, it will become another disaster," said Khan, noting the area could get sub-zero temperatures.
Khan also said medical aid was needed in the remote villages.
He said that in early November, a CRS team reached one village that no relief workers had visited. With the villagers unable to carry the injured on their shoulders down the mountains to the nearest road, some of those injured had developed severe infections.
He also said that in such villages there were an "unusually high" number of people with fevers, coughs and dysentery due to water contamination and exposure to cold due to lack of shelter.
Without adequate protection from cold, Khan said, "even these common diseases could be deadly" for the hundreds of such remote villages once snowfall starts.
